Books

OK, look, I know how it sounds when I say that I wind down from a long day on the internet by playing a game on the internet. I’m a freelance journalist writing a book about private equity, which means I spend my working hours toggling…

Charlotte is the TikTok generation’s Virgin Mary. Only she’s not human, and she’s carrying up to four messiahs.For a brief moment, some wondered aloud whether Charlotte, a round stingray about the size of a serving platter, might have been…

In her new memoir, Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites a 2014 profile that dubbed her “Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist.” She might prefer to downplay the first and emphasize the second. Some people would switch that around.…

While the finer points of running a social media business can be debated, one basic truth is that they all run on attention. Tech leaders are incentivized to grow their user bases so there are more people looking at more ads for more time.…

A few months ago, I was called in at the last minute to participate in an onstage fireside chat at an Authors’ Guild event. (I’m on the nonprofit’s council, but of course I speak here only for myself.) Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger and I spent…

Public perception of psychological operations soured in a big way in the mid-1970s, when details of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program were first released, detailing a plot—more based in science fiction than science—to brainwash subjects using…

Disney+, if you didn’t know, isn’t just for kids. With its ownership of the Lucasfilm brand and the Marvel titles, the streaming service also offers plenty of grown-up content in its bid to compete with Netflix and Amazon—and we’re not just…

The Dungeons & Dragons video game Baldur’s Gate 3 has become a cultural phenomenon, winning countless accolades including Game of the Year. One of the game’s biggest fans is science fiction editor John Joseph Adams, who has played…

David Lynch’s 1984 sci-fi epic Dune is—in many ways—a misbegotten botch job. Still, as with more than a few ineffectively ambitious films before it, the artistic flourishes Lynch grafted onto Frank Herbert’s sprawling Machiavellian…

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard.…